What does it mean to prevent harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) among young people? Our two new papers explore this question by examining how professionals—including police, educators and children’s service providers—understand and respond to sexual harm in school settings. Our findings point to a pressing need to move beyond reactive, individualised, behaviour-focused models where punishment is the primary response, and towards more holistic, relational and context-sensitive approaches. But doing so isn’t straightforward. In this blog, we unpack some of the core tensions in current practice and explore what a more grounded, ethical approach might look like.
Policing, surveillance and the paradox of ‘relationship-based practice’
Generally, the idea of relationship-based practice centres on building connection, trust, and a sense of safety as a foundation for meaningful intervention—connection before correction. While police officers in our study often characterised their work as ‘relationship-based’, drawing on dialogue, trust and trauma-informed engagement, these same interactions were frequently entwined with aims of intelligence-gathering and behaviour management. This reflects a broader tension: caring, relational practices can support young people but may also be drawn into institutional cultures of surveillance and control.
We’re not arguing that relationship-based practice should avoid disclosure or prevent professionals from identifying harm. Rather, the concern lies in how such relationships are enacted and interpreted by young people—and who they are deployed with. Too often, these practices are targeted at specific groups seen as ‘at risk’ or ‘risky’, reinforcing existing inequalities and drawing certain young people into webs of scrutiny under the guise of care.
In some cases, relationship-building was described by officers as a way to encourage young people to ‘spill the beans’, with disclosures framed as valuable ‘intel’. This raises questions about consent, transparency and what such practices do to trust and who young people turn to if they feel betrayed by adults they believed were ‘safe’. At other times, participants reflected more openly on the need to understand and connect with young people in order to respond meaningfully to the challenges they face.
Navigating these dynamics without jeopardising trust requires more than good intentions. It demands professional reflexivity and dedicated training. Many officers we spoke to showed a strong instinct for relationship-based engagement, yet this skillset is not always formally acknowledged or consistently supported within policing cultures or training structures. Without such recognition, relational approaches risk being unevenly applied or subsumed into broader objectives centred on surveillance and deterrence. These challenges unfold in a wider context of public scrutiny and diminished trust in policing, shaped by recent controversies involving protest policing, stop and search, and high-profile misconduct cases, as well as wider global discourse, particularly from the US, around systemic racism and abuse of power.
Digital intimacies: The legal tangle of consent, abuse and abstinence
One of the starkest contradictions in current practice concerns digital sexual cultures, particularly image sharing. There is a striking inconsistency in how adolescents are permitted to claim sexual citizenship, marked by legal and moral contradictions. While teenagers can legally engage in sexual activity from the age of 16, the production and distribution of sexual images involving anyone under 18 remains criminalised, even when consensual. As a result, many well-meaning adults, including police and school professionals, often fall back on abstinence-based messaging: “Don’t share anything, ever.”
Yet many professionals also recognise that such blanket messaging is both unrealistic and, at times, counterproductive. It risks conflating consensual and non-consensual acts, potentially leading to victim-blaming and closing down opportunities for honest, meaningful dialogue. This contrasts sharply with how physical sexual activity is often approached, where education tends to draw on principles of harm reduction, consent and capacity, even when the activity is technically underage. However, recent shifts suggest a narrowing of these progressive approaches. Notably, the absence of any reference to Gillick competence in the current RSE guidance marks a step backwards, given its longstanding role in supporting young people’s access to advice and care. Ultimately, whether online or offline, it is far safer for young people to seek help from trusted adults than to feel silenced by fear of judgement or punishment. The rationale is clear: young people need the tools to navigate intimate situations with safety, confidence and ethical awareness.
So, are we making the same mistakes again, this time with image-based sexual abuse? Why do prevention efforts often sidestep the core issue—aggravated, non-consensual sharing—in favour of blanket prohibitions? And what messages do young people take from this ambiguity? In practice, many are left confused: unsure whether all image sharing is abuse, and fearful that any disclosure will result in punishment, shame or judgement.
This has serious implications for how disclosures are handled. Even when the concern is clearly about aggravated, non-consensual sharing—often amounting to clear abuse—the surrounding messaging can imply fault or poor judgement on all sides. The dominant narrative becomes one of mutual error, where all parties are told they need to ‘learn the law’ and refrain from sharing altogether. This framing is markedly different from how disclosures of rape or physical sexual assault are typically approached: there, any consensual underage sex is not treated as relevant or compromising to the allegation. In contrast, with image-based abuse, consensual image sharing—even if unrelated—can become part of the narrative, muddying the waters of harm and potentially deterring victim-survivors from coming forward. The result is a conflation of ethical and legal questions in ways that can obscure accountability, erode trust and inhibit support.
The limits of the law and the gaps in legal education
The issue lies not only in how the law is applied, but in how it is taught. Many young people are introduced to legal categories in binary terms—rape, sexual assault, consent, illegality—with the implication that breaking the law will inevitably lead to serious consequences. The nuances of evidentiary thresholds, police discretion, and public interest tests are rarely discussed. This can create a disconnect between young people’s expectations and the realities of how such cases are handled in practice.
If allegations arise and no formal action (NFA) follows, young people may interpret this as injustice or disbelief. The length of the investigative process can reopen issues that felt settled, with little recognition that ‘police time’ and ‘teenage time’ operate on very different scales. An NFA outcome may be seen—rightly or wrongly—as implying that the victim was not believed, or that the accused has faced disruption without cause. This perception is shaped by simplified legal messaging that young people interpret as suggesting that those who break the law will always be prosecuted. In a peer culture already shaped by polarised narratives around ‘false accusations’ and ‘cancel culture’, such dynamics risk fuelling mistrust and deterring disclosure. It is not enough to simply teach the law; we must also address its limitations, its discretionary nature, and the broader ethical questions that extend beyond legal adjudication.
This presents real challenges for educators and police. In England, schools are under a statutory duty to teach young people about the law on rape, sexual assault, consent and related issues through the RSE curriculum. But the curriculum is time-limited, and the pressure to cover core legal concepts often results in a narrow focus on offence categories and age thresholds. This risks giving the impression that the law is straightforward and uniformly applied, when, in reality, legal responses to sexual harm involve complex procedures, high evidentiary thresholds and discretionary decisions around public interest.
Without education on these procedural realities—what happens after a report is made, what thresholds must be met, what outcomes are possible—young people are often left unprepared for what unfolds when they, or someone they know, becomes involved in an incident. Some only encounter these complexities for the first time when it directly affects them: as a complainant, a suspect, a witness or part of the wider peer community. Several police officers we spoke to acknowledged this gap. Although they often have limited time for preventive education work, some felt strongly that this kind of legal literacy is essential if young people are to understand both their rights and the limits of the justice system.
From behaviours to harm: Rethinking how we understand risk
Across our research, professionals often demonstrated thoughtful engagement with the vulnerabilities that young people bring into their relationships and environments. Many were acutely aware that factors such as trauma, neglect, social disadvantage or special educational needs may increase the risk of both experiencing and enacting harm. Importantly, they also recognised that these vulnerabilities are not merely individual. They are shaped and intensified by broader cultures of normalisation, misogyny and peer dynamics.
Yet despite this awareness, we found that reactive safeguarding cultures—often characterised by limited time, institutional risk aversion and bureaucratic pressure—tend to fall back on behaviour-driven approaches. These approaches foreground individual actions, with an emphasis on identifying, managing and mitigating personal ‘risk’, often at the expense of engaging with the relational, institutional and socio-cultural contexts in which harm unfolds. The result is a narrowing of focus: from systemic conditions to isolated behaviours; from shared responsibility to individual pathology.
Addressing HSB requires us to go further. It calls for critical reflexivity not only among young people but also among the adults tasked with supporting them. How professionals frame harm, what they perceive as risky or normal, and how they interpret disclosures are shaped by their own assumptions, institutional constraints and cultural scripts. Without recognising this, there is a danger that responses to harm reproduce the very hierarchies and silences they seek to challenge. A more holistic, relational approach must centre not just on identifying need and vulnerability, but on questioning how adult authority, institutional norms and unequal power dynamics shape the entire ecology of response.
Conclusion: Towards holistic and honest engagement
Our findings show that addressing sexual harm in schools requires more than better policies or stricter enforcement. It demands a fundamental rethinking of how we conceptualise harm, support young people and define the goals of our interventions. That means acknowledging tensions between care and control, clarifying what the law can and cannot do, and engaging with the messy realities of young people’s digital and embodied sexual cultures.
We need an approach that centres ethical education, relational trust and critical reflection, not just compliance. Anything less, risks leaving young people adrift and underprepared in a world of contradictory messages, unmet needs and unresolved harm.
To learn more about the study and the findings, our open access publications can be found in the Journal of Sexual Aggression and the Journal of Children and Society.
We produced a full report and training resources for police, educators and other professionals here:
The research was conducted by Emily Setty, Jonny Hunt and Jessica Ringrose, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.